The relationship between the use of concrete objects and pictorial representations of those objects when teaching noun labels to 3 autistic boys was analyzed. Although results indicated no consistent functional relationship between the two types of stimulus presentation, there were varying degrees of generalization between the two conditions.…

Suggests that the growth of receptive language functioning in very young children is a crucial developmental area and summarizes some major issues involved in attempting to learn more about it. Portions of this text were included in an invited presentation at the 1969 Conference on Research and Teaching of Infant Development, Merrill-Palmer…

Two experiments, with about five autistic children (two to 14 years old) in each experiment, assessed the effects of autistic immediate echolalia on acquisition and generalization of receptive labeling tasks. These results indicated that echolalia faciliated generalization for echolalic autistic children but not for functionally mute autistic…

Seventeen Down's Syndrome (DS) children (9-12 years old) scored significantly lower than retarded non-DS and nonretarded students on arts of the Token Test for Children requiring sequential or syntactic processing. Ss showed no deficits in tasks requiring spatial/simultaneous processing. Results suggested a possible right-hemisphere dominance for…

A study investigated the effect of foreign accent and speaking rate on native English speaker comprehension. Three native Chinese speakers and one native speaker of American English read passages at different speaking rates. Comprehension scores showed that an increase in speaking rate and heavily accented English decreased listener comprehension.…

This study explored the sensitivity of 20 10- to 11-month-old infants to the phonological characteristics of their native language. Tone-probe event-related potentials were obtained for subjects listening to a story, either with normal English function morphemes or modified with atypical function morphemes. Results suggest that the 11-month-olds,…

Investigation of the impact of speaking rate variations in the linguistic input provided to 32 school-age children (half with specific language impairment (SLI) found both SLI and typical children had similar recognition accuracy, but SLI children had significantly more difficulty with the production of novel words presented at a fast rate.…

Reports on a longitudinal study that investigated the claim that phonological memory contributes to vocabulary acquisition in young children. Findings show support for the claim that the capacity component of nonword repetition contributes directly to vocabulary in young children. (Author/VWL)

This study measured the receptive communication skills of 14 adults with significant intellectual disability living in community group homes in Connecticut. Group home staff members rated the 14 participants using a 14-item rating scale sensitive to the adult living situation. These individuals appeared to have relatively stronger skills for…

In this article, the author describes ways in which teachers can help children who exhibit problems in communicating due to language difficulties. In this particular case, the child described is very good at expressing herself, but does not seem to understand what others say to her, which limits her ability to follow directions and to interact…

Children with developmental disabilities are slower to develop skills at intentional and symbolic communication than typically developing children, and may rely on atypical patterns of preintentional behaviors to support more complex communication development. The present study compared complex gaze engagement behaviors elicited by 25…

Background: The study is the first within trial cost analysis of direct versus indirect and individual versus group modes of speech-and-language therapy for children with primary language impairment. Aims: To compare the short-run resource consequences of the four interventions alongside the effects achieved measured by standardized scores on a…

This study examined progress after 1 year of treatment for children with autism who received a mean of 36 hours per week one-to-one University of California at Los Angeles Applied Behavior Analysis (UCLA ABA) treatment. Two types of service provision were compared: an intensive clinic based treatment model with all treatment personnel (N = 23),…

Purpose: This exploratory study examined the feasibility of homeless parents' participation in an intervention to increase use of facilitating language strategies during interactions with their preschool children while residing in family homeless shelters. This study also examined the intervention's impact on the parents' use of facilitating…

After hemispherectomy (removal or disconnection of an entire cerebral hemisphere) in childhood for treatment of intractable epilepsy, gross speech and language functions are often rescued. Whether more complex functions, such as syntactic processing, are selectively impaired, remains controversial. Here we present a cross-sectional study of…